Using Bookmarking Services for SEO – An Excellent Opportunity You Should Not Leave Unexplored
Using social bookmarking services for search engine optimization is becoming a more and more powerful online marketing tool, a more and more popular method to increase website exposure. However, social bookmarking is much more than simply creating a profile for your company on an online bookmarking service and storing relevant URLs: you need to use your bookmarks in an organized, strategic way to be able to explore the entire potential of this new marketing method. In what follows, we will give you a few tips on how to make the best out of social bookmarking.
Create a Strong and Attractive Profile
Your profile is your online business card, so you should try to make the most out of it. Your full profile should contain any information you consider important to share about your company’s activity, its history, products or services, and you should also add your company logo.
If you need more help to create your profile, browse other user profiles on bookmarking sites to see what they look like – you can get some inspiration from the profiles of successful, active users.
Diversify Your Links
The more varied the backlinks to the promoted website are, the higher value is assigned to the website. The more valuable your website is seen by search engines, the higher it will rank on SERPs. This may seem very simple, but if you are to make the most of your marketing campaign using bookmarking services, you need to create profiles for your company on several different bookmark sites. Search engines have a way of finding out if the backlinks to your website are all coming from the same social bookmarking service and will detect the strategy as unethical, punishing your site by decreasing its ranking.
Schedule the Volume of Your Backlinks Coming from Bookmarking Services
Search engines will also detect if the volume of your backlinks skyrockets overnight and will consider your site over-optimized – again, reducing the ranking. The best way to use social bookmarks is by building up the backlinks slowly, based on a certain schedule.
The quantity of the links you can distribute on social bookmarking sites is not limited, so you can bookmark not only your home page, but your other pages as well; however, make sure that you use high PR bookmarking sites to link back to your homepage and the most important pages
Search engines will monitor the quantity of backlinks you get per day, and they become suspicious if you get 10,000 links overnight. Moderation is the key to success, so don’t expect instant traffic from bookmarking services. You should get around 30-40 backlinks a day – this quantity is still viewed as natural by search engines.
Using Tags, Descriptions and Titles
Each bookmark you make needs a tag, a title and a description. You can create a number of bookmarks relating to the same topic, even to the same keyword, but you should never use the same description/tag for two different bookmarks. Using the same title, tag or description for two distinct bookmarks will make you suspect of spamming and you will not be able to get any results out of your efforts.
Combine Methods
Usually, it is not enough to create profiles on social bookmark sites and then distribute the link to your company website, especially if you are a newcomer on the site and you don’t have a strong relationship with the other users. You need to distribute many links to be able to establish yourself as a trustworthy user.
If your SEO campaign uses other tools, like article marketing, video sharing or other types of content published across several other websites, you will have increased chances to get traffic to your website. Note that a good SEO article is not obviously promotional – it provides consistent and structured information about the topic it tackles. If you post a link to articles of this type on social bookmarking sites, the other users on may find answers to their own questions with the help of your sources, establishing you as someone knowledgeable and worth listening to.
Social bookmarking services provide excellent possibilities, but only if you use them right. Design your bookmarking campaign carefully before you start it, create an interesting, colorful profile for your company and then start bookmarking or, if you think that you don’t have the time or the energy to manage the campaign yourself, turn to the services of professionals; the experienced SEO companies know the intricacies of social bookmarking and they also know how search engines work, so your social bookmarking campaign will surely be best handled by one of these professionals.